Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Tag: due process

Anomie

10.09.2025 /

Those who have been following me over time know of my tremendous esteem for Glenn Greenwald’s doggedly non-partisan reporting, currently on Rumble. However, I have not listened much to him lately. He naturally tends to concentrate on US affairs, and frankly, they don’t interest me much. After all, I live in Europe, where we have a war which eclipses all other issues, at least from the point of view of the interventionist political elite.

The other day, I read that the US had wiped a little open boat off the map. To use D.H. Wallace terminology, the US had “demapped” 11 persons in an open boat in international waters. I wondered briefly why on earth the US would do such a thing, then shrugged the matter off as “typical”. Please note: I shrugged. SHRUGGED about the massacre – extra-judicial killing – of 11 people in international waters. I add, to my defence that the Norwegian media wasted little ink on the matter.

I decided to listen to what Glenn Greenwald had to say about the matter (to be frank, I was more interested in hearing his take on the latest developments in the Epstein saga promised in the same episode).

Glenn Greenwald brought me back to earth quite robustly. He had no intention of fluttering gently over the extra-judicial killing of 11 persons by the US.

Instead he sternly asked the MAGA voters, “Do you believe, do you really believe that this was about drugs?” Raising his voice slightly, he went on: “What is the difference between the neocon policies that you, the MAGA people, oppose, and this?” Saying this, he looked me – the telespectator (MAGA or otherwise) – straight in the eye, accusing me or whoever else was watching him of condoning the incident with complacency.

And, yes, I felt guilty, although I certainly am not MAGA. I felt and definitely was guilty of assuming international law is no longer. International law still exists, but because of Gaza, because of the impunity of the savage crimes being committed by the Israelis with US blessings, all other crimes seem negligible. Because the USA is complicit in the crimes in Gaza, and because all other Western states are subordinate to the USA, international law is not being upheld.

That does not mean that the UN charter is null and void. That does not mean that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the UN conventions, including the Genocide convention, have not been globally agreed upon and ratified. Above all, I am convinced that if they were asked, the overwhelming majority of normal human beings all over the world (excepting of course the Israelis) would loudly cheer as the articles of the Declaration of Human Rights were read out to them.

I have assumed, but I have been wrong, that the “anything-goes-as -long-as-you-are-strong-and-dastardly-enough-LAW” applies. Biden referred to that law as “the rules-based order”. No such law has ever been ratified by any global authority. The Western nations tagged along behind “Daddy”, as they always do, but we all knew, or should have known that it was a hoax. No such law, no such order, exists. If we forget that, we become as degenerate as those who authorized the hoax in the first place, as well as the crimes committed in pursuance of it.

The USA has killed much more than the 11 unknown nationals and certainly not for the first time. (In that respect, I was right in muttering “typical”.) It has effectively killed the principles underlying its own judicial system. What is null and void, then, is US rule of law.

Glenn Greenwald did not say that. He is, after all, a US citizen, I think. But he was unusually, vitriolic about the issue, when he returned to it in a subsequent episode, yesterday, in fact. JD Vance and Rand Paul clash over due process

So now the United States government just has the power to go around and blow up any ship it wants, whatever ship it wants, and just declare afterwards that it was filled with drugs and drug dealers? .… to bomb wedding parties… there was someone there who had ties to a terrorist group… We don’t show evidence either before or after, we just claim the right to go around droning anybody we want.

And that was just the start. Glenn Greenwald felt, I think, shame and deep contempt for those who are complacent about such acts.

And he made me feel deeply ashamed. We are sliding, morally, I mean, losing our grip. Not just in the USA, but also here in Norway.

A few days prior to our national elections, students in upper secondary school all over my country carried out their own “election”. The result was interesting, to say the least, because the two parties furthest to the right won 47 per cent of the votes. These parties are primarily interested in getting rid of taxes, particularly the wealth tax. (I should add that only a small minority of Norwegians pay wealth tax.) The environmentalist party won only 4 per cent.

So youngsters here are not worried about the accelerating ecological breakdown. They are not overly concerned about growing inequality, and they certainly do not care for any redistribution of wealth. In short, the exercise seems to indicate a) a disturbing degree of ignorance b) a lack of interest in the common good.

I should, however, take comfort in knowing, or at least hoping, that Norway has not yet degenerated to the point of carrying out extra-judicial killings in international waters.

… Assange

20.09.2020 /

No, I’m not done yet. And the extradition hearing isn’t over. Its outcome is crucial not only for Assange, but for us all.

For many people, the Trump period has been a watershed, a scales-falling-from-the-eyes event. For others, the turning point came much earlier, with Wikileaks, which is why the US authorities hate Assange so vehemently. Moreover, many honest US American citizens have clung at length to the hope that the Iraq war and Bush had merely been aberrations, so defence of Julian Asange has therefore not been deafening in the USA, a country where brave men and women are willing to risk their lives in the great “Black Lives Matter” battle, and where many firefighters are loosing their lives in the fight against climate devastation. There is no lack of bravery in the USA, just a lack of information. Julian Assange attempted to provide some of the missing information. He was not thanked.

Daniel Ellsberg‘s Pentagon Papers in 1971 were also a scales-falling-from-the-eyes event from which we have unfortunately not learned enough. I recommend listening to Daniel Ellsberg’s explaining why he is a witness for the defence of Julian Assange. What he says applies specifically to the prosecution’s hypocritical charges that Assange put people’s lives at risk with Cablegate.

European authorities, fearing US backlashes, appear to be discouraging the media from highlighting the ignoble (i.e. illegal ) conditions of Julian Asange’s lengthy captivity and the parody of the legal proceedings against him. In any civilised court, illegally obtained evidence would not be acccepted. Not so, in this case, it seems; see example of illegal surveillance of Julian Assange.

I have just discovered, that there is a small newspaper in my own small country, that has been granted access to the preposterous extradition hearing and is diligently covering it. I expect it has been granted access because it is not widely read.

Saturday’s issue includes an article about a US torture victim who had just witnessed for Assange. If I have understood correctly – after all, I wasn’t there – the US tried and eventually succeeded in blocking the witness’s appearance. In the end, however, his written statement was read to the court. The witness stated that diplomatic notes among Wikileaks’s “Cablegate” were instrumental as evidence in his own legal battle for justice (in Europe, that is, not in the USA).

Since I’m sure you may be as ignorant as I was about the legal battle in question, I would like to direct your attention to the Wikipedia article that covers it. However, since there is a risk that the article will be tampered with in the wake of the Assange hearing, I think I had better just paste a quote from Wikipedia as at 20/09/2020 (without the reference numbers).

Khaled El-Masri … ,[born] 1963, is a German and Lebanese citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the “Salt Pit”, the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees whom the CIA abducted from 2001–2005.

In May 2004, the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Daniel R. Coats, convinced the German interior minister, Otto Schily, not to press charges or to reveal the program. El-Masri filed suit against the CIA for his arrest, extraordinary rendition and torture. In 2006, his suit El Masri v. Tenet, in which he was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was dismissed by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, based on the U.S. government’s claiming the state secrets privilege. The ACLU said the Bush administration attempted to shield its abuses by invoking this privilege. The case was also dismissed by the Appeals Court for the Fourth Circuit, and in December 2007, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

On 13 December 2012, El-Masri won an Article 34 case at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The court determined he had been tortured while held by CIA agents and ruled that Macedonia was responsible for abusing him while in the country, and knowingly transferring him to the CIA when torture was a possibility. It awarded him compensation. This marked the first time that CIA activities against detainees was legally declared as torture. The European Court condemned nations for collaborating with the United States in these secret programs.

The Julian Assange case (not to mention the El Masri case before him) is critical for all Europeans, not to mention US nationals. It is a demonstration of the bullying our governments submit to from the USA. Our European governments are accessories to US government-sponsored outrageous acts of every conceivable flavour. The extradition case is also an example of how due process is being eroded in the UK.

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